I have been looking in to this today out of sheer boredom and to be honest I find it hard not to laugh at. I feel if extraterrestrial beings have visited earth we would undoubtly know about it. It wouldn't speculation or some giant government cover up. Whats your thoughts on this subject?

People see man made UFOs like the stealth bomber no doubt...but extra-terrestrials, nope. If they do ever arrive it will be like something out of Arthur C Clarks Rendezvous With Rama....A giant city sized ship traveling for generations on end at sub light speed long removed from their home civilization and completely unmistakable to everyone on earth.

(30-08-2013 09:48 AM)sequoyah Wrote: I have been looking in to this today out of sheer boredom and to be honest I find it hard not to laugh at. I feel if extraterrestrial beings have visited earth we would undoubtly know about it. It wouldn't speculation or some giant government cover up. Whats your thoughts on this subject?

Multiple alien species have been in contact with Earth for extended periods of time - involving at minimum thousands of people in decades of successive administrations in several countries; involving at maximum all of human history - and have left no reliable evidence. This despite the fact that it would only take the actions of one person to expose any number of key documents/media/evidence, in a human contact scenario, or the just about any possible accident or carelessness on behalf the aliens, which would leave behind an anomalous and/or out of place artifact (unless such a discovery were completely covered up every time it happened, again across all of human history).

If the aliens are not a monolithic bloc, but are in fact rival groups, then they have not acted to expose each other, despite the advantage it might present. OR they have, and all such efforts have been countered in turn.

If the aliens are here to gather resources, then they are doing so despite the fact that whatever resources may be gained on Earth are far more readily available - at much less risk of exposure or incident - from innumerable other sources in deep space.

Alien craft - which must perforce travel to and from Earth, and in most scenarios land - are entirely undetectable, and communicate through similarly undetectable means (involving physics we can't even imagine, and thus rendering anything we might do utterly insignificant and irrelevant by comparison) or else the cover-up agency has the ability to get to every telescope and observer on the planet.

Past reports of night visitations, abductions, visions, etc involving supernatural entities are either imagined - in which case the modern alien-related incidents are exactly the same entirely by coincidence - or else they were also real alien interactions, meaning such interaction is not merely a modern phenomenon, and dates back hundreds if not thousands of years - complicating the masquerade by orders of magnitude.

(30-08-2013 09:54 AM)ridethespiral Wrote: They are out there but they are far, far, far too far.

People see man made UFOs like the stealth bomber no doubt...but extra-terrestrials, nope. If they do ever arrive it will be like something out of Arthur C Clarks Rendezvous With Rama....A giant city sized ship traveling for generations on end at sub light speed long removed from their home civilization and completely unmistakable to everyone on earth.

Well a stealth bomber is, by default, NOT a UFO.

As for extra terrestrials, I agree they probably don't visit Earth very much, if at all.

My guess is if they are capable of doing so, they would seem almost godlike to us. They might even be extra physical, capable of traveling at infinite velocities and occupying multiple points of the cosmos as well as other universes at any given time. Possibly something like the Q race from Star Trek.

If Earth isn't struck by a large asteroid or a mutated flu virus doesn't wipe us out first, we may join them at some point in time. We're at the edge of a quantum leap in scientific understanding and exploration right now. It possible we can't even imagine what the human race will become in 1000 years and that's nothing on a cosmic timescale.

It's also possible that we could run into an alien race similar to that in the Arthur C Clark book, but even they might be a very primitive race in the grand scheme of things.

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(31-08-2013 04:21 AM)Carlo_The_Bugsmasher_Driver Wrote: Well a stealth bomber is, by default, NOT a UFO.

UFO is just 'unidentified flying object'. If someone sees something and can't identify it, it's a UFO - even though it may well be utterly explicable; I say 'may well be', but it's not as though I've ever heard of any that can't be identified to a qualified observer or on later investigation. Satellites, aircraft, mirages, imaging artifacts...

(31-08-2013 04:21 AM)Carlo_The_Bugsmasher_Driver Wrote: Well a stealth bomber is, by default, NOT a UFO.

UFO is just 'unidentified flying object'. If someone sees something and can't identify it, it's a UFO - even though it may well be utterly explicable; I say 'may well be', but it's not as though I've ever heard of any that can't be identified to a qualified observer or on later investigation. Satellites, aircraft, mirages, imaging artifacts...

That's one of my pet peeves right there: people using the term UFO synonymously with "spacecraft from another planet flown by aliens." It's a strong indicator of the ignorance that runs rampant.

99% of all UFO sightings are later identified, thus leaving only 1% unexplained. Still, at no point would that even imply that the unidentified would be spacecraft, or extra-terrestrial in origin.

I heard once an interesting fact about alien visitors/abductions:
Presently, people claim to see and be visited by aliens with large heads, almond shaped black eyes, small bodies, and are completely hairless. Yet, decades ago (1940s or 1950s perhaps) the common description was that of a more muscular, hairy alien (sort of a Lon Chaney werewolf). Gee, could these sightings simply be a result of the power of suggestion based upon pop culture?

(30-08-2013 09:48 AM)sequoyah Wrote: I have been looking in to this today out of sheer boredom and to be honest I find it hard not to laugh at. I feel if extraterrestrial beings have visited earth we would undoubtly know about it. It wouldn't speculation or some giant government cover up. Whats your thoughts on this subject?

I have seen several UFOs during daylight. Once me and my family observed a UFO, being pursued by two jet airplanes close by. The UFO had a similar silvery cigar shape on the distance, almost the same as the jets, only without wings and unlike them, did not leave any condensation trail. It flew a little faster and got away, beyond the horizon.
Other notable case was a longer, "double" silvery cigar shape, flying not toward the horizon in constant altitude, but in sloping upwards direction, so it disappeared from sight much sooner than it would hide behind horizon. I thought it even glowed like gold before it disappeared, but that might be a reflection from sunlight. It was anyway the first time I saw something going up the atmosphere

Other cases were just this silvery object flying normally, without contrail, without a change of direction, nothing fancy. But clearly very fast, never slower than a jet airplane. Much faster and higher than any blimp. I never actually saw a blimp here. And it's interesting, I never had a problem telling them apart from airplanes. Smooth shapes, no wings.
I'm not sure what to think of these, everyone's descriptions of UFOs are much different from that. I didn't see any glowing, maneuvering things, not in the daylight, anyway. I think aliens have reserved these fancy acrobatic vessels to play spectacles above major cities of the world. What I saw were just cargo ships

(30-08-2013 09:48 AM)sequoyah Wrote: I have been looking in to this today out of sheer boredom and to be honest I find it hard not to laugh at. I feel if extraterrestrial beings have visited earth we would undoubtly know about it. It wouldn't speculation or some giant government cover up. Whats your thoughts on this subject?

I was talking to my friend in my Scientific Studies class about the Ancient Aliens 'documentary' and my teach heard me and decided to give the class a small lecture about what aliens would most likely be like. Here's a cut down version:

". . . The only species which seek to expand their territory known on Earth are all aggressive species. Including humans, we even seek to expand into space. . .
(Based on this observation that aggressive species seek to expand)
What would come to Earth would not be ET. It would be the thing that ate ET."

I wish I could remember the whole discussion he had word for word, but alas.

When it comes to Aliens and UFO's I think i agree with Steven Hawking on the matter. Humans making contact with them would be very bad for us.

Also; one thing about the "UFO" classification.
As previously mentioned into this thread, UFO stands for "Unidentified Flying Object". This annoys me, why? Because it is redundant: by calling something a UFO, you have named it, thus identified it making it no longer a UFO, by definition.

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
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